Downwardly Mobile Elites Love Zohran Mamdani

BY REIHAN SALAM

Urban millennials who are worse off than their parents embrace the mayoral candidate’s zero-sum politics. But are those voters the future of the Democratic Party?

One of the most important things to understand about Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old socialist who recently stunned the political establishment by winning the Democratic mayoral nomination in New York City, is that he has spent his young adult life much worse off than his parents. He knows the sting of having grown up in bourgeois comfort only to find himself scrambling to pay the rent in a less fashionable neighborhood. That experience is a major reason why he’s emerged as the darling of the millennial left, a movement defined by its sense of downward mobility.

It would have been hard for any young adult to match the accomplishments of Mamdani’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, a tenured professor at Columbia University and prominent left-wing intellectual, and his mother, Mira Nair, a renowned filmmaker whose directorial debut, “Salaam Bombay!,” was released to global acclaim

Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani at the NYC Pride Parade, June 29.

when she was 31. But even the children of less successful Boomers often feel as though they haven’t measured up to their parents.

Drawing on decades of IRS data, researchers at Opportunity Insights, an economic policy institute, found that among Americans born in 1940, 92% earned more than their parents at age 30. For those born in 1984, only 50% did. And that decline has political consequences.

Researchers at the Social Economics Lab have found a strong correlation between perceiving yourself to be less well-off than your parents and zero-sum thinking, or the belief that gains for some people come at the expense of others. Moreover, roughly 40% of the nation’s 72 million millennials—people born between 1981 and 1996—live in highcost, hypercompetitive metropolitan areas, where milestones such as owning a home or paying off student loan debt can loom as distant dreams.

Between millennials who are worse off than their parents, those who believe they’re worse off and those who live in dysfunctional bluestate metros where house-hunting can feel like “The Hunger Games,” America has a critical mass of people whose expectations of intergenerational progress have gone sour. Billionaire-bashing political entrepreneurs like Mamdani have figured out how to scratch that psychopolitical itch. In the mayoral primary, Mamdani’s strongest support came from what political commentator Michael Lange calls New York’s “Commie Corridor,” defined as “youthful, renter-heavy neighborhoods known for their left-leaning politics.”

Of course, not all millennials feel miserable. Indeed, if you look at hard numbers, the generation has a lot to show for itself. Because millennials have a higher level of educational attainment than Gen X— Americans born between 1965 and 1980—they’ve taken a bit longer to hit their economic stride, but they’ve moved ahead quickly in recent years. The median household income for millennials is 18% higher than Gen X at the same stage of life, economists Kevin Corinth and Jeff Larrimore have found. While millennials have a somewhat lower homeownership rate than Gen X did at their age, they’re much more likely to own stocks, resulting in significantly higher median wealth.

Nevertheless, Corinth and Larrimore’s research hints at the sources of urban millennial discontent.

While millennials at the 25th percentile of the income distribution saw their incomes grow significantly faster than Gen Xers’, those at the 75th percentile saw their incomes grow more slowly.

Since people tend to compare themselves to members of their own social milieu, it should hardly come as a surprise that graduates of selective colleges living in eye-wateringly expensive urban neighborhoods resent the fact that they can’t afford a home of their own. All but the richest millennials find themselves priced out of fashionable enclaves in Berkeley, Calif., and Brooklyn, in part thanks to stringent landuse regulation and other antidevelopment measures. One could always move to a lower-cost, lesscompetitive city, where a middleclass life is more readily achievable, but to many urban millennials, doing so would be tantamount to admitting defeat.

To complexity scientist Peter Turchin, the rise of urban millennial discontent reflects a severe and growing imbalance between the small number of truly elite roles in modern America—think billionaire and centimillionaire entrepreneurs, cultural and academic luminaries, and high-ranking government officials— and the growing number of credentialed young people who aspire to them. According to Turchin’s theory of “elite overproduction,” intensifying competition for a fixed number of elite roles leads to intensifying social conflict, up to and including outbreaks of political violence. To head off civil strife, he favors egalitarian policies that would cut the elites down to size—not unlike the policies championed by Mamdani and his ideological allies.

The case for Mamdaniism’s staying power is straightforward. The Democratic coalition is increasingly dominated by younger, more educated voters. In 2024, 48% of Kamala Harris’s voters had a bachelor’s degree, and the same percentage were under 50. By comparison, 33% percent of Donald Trump’s voters were college-educated, and only 39% percent were under 50. Harris’s coalition was more than twice as urban as Trump’s, at 28% to 13%. One way or another, the Democratic Party’s next presidential nominee will have to reckon with the power of millennial Mamdani voters.

So is Mamdani’s brand of zerosum radicalism the future of American politics? That depends on whether the anxieties of urban millennials resonate with their peers in the sprawling suburbs of the Sunbelt.

If you’re a frugal 40-something who managed to buy a home in an uncool suburb before 2022, when mortgage interest rates started to soar, there is an excellent chance you’ve seen your home-equity wealth and retirement savings skyrocket over the past few years. If you’re a child of blue-collar immigrants from Mexico or the Philippines, it’s likely you’ve surpassed your parents economically and thus have a keen appreciation for how far you and your family have come.

Some millennials moved to the suburbs to escape rising rents and home prices in urban cores. Others are lifelong suburbanites who’d never dream of raising a family cooped up in the big city. For every millennial Mamdani voter in Astoria, Queens, there is at least one millennial moderate in a city like Frisco, Texas, a booming suburb of 240,000 that has grown by 3,900% since 1990. These suburban voters are more concerned about growing their 401k than they are about taxing the rich to fund free buses and government- owned apartment complexes.

And that could explain why many national Democrats have been so reluctant to embrace Mamdani. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, represents Bedford-Stuyvesant, a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood where Mamdani performed exceedingly well in the Democratic primary. Rather than rush to endorse the Democratic

America has a critical mass of people whose expectations of intergenerational progress have gone sour.

mayoral nominee, Jeffries has been circumspect, making it clear that he wants to see if Mamdani can reach voters beyond the millennial left.

One potential explanation for this wariness is that there is bad blood between Democratic Party regulars like Jeffries and Mamdani’s allies in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a left-wing activist group that Jeffries’s staff has reportedly dubbed “Team Gentrification.” Buoyed by Mamdani’s recent victory, the DSA is planning a slew of primary challenges against establishment Democrats, including Jeffries himself.

Another reason Jeffries might be slow-walking an endorsement is that, as House minority leader, he will be judged on whether he can lead Democrats to a majority in the upcoming midterms. While leftwing Democrats might be able to hold deep-blue House seats in the five boroughs of New York City, they’re unlikely to fare as well in swing districts in suburban New York and New Jersey, let alone in Florida, Georgia or Texas.

The question for Mamdaniism is not just whether it will play in Park Slope or Prospect Lefferts Gardens— it’s whether it will play in Plano. Reihan Salam is president of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.